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The Music Industry's Crisis Writ Large
The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It's accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming. "Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday. ... 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. ... [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music 'regularly' and nearly a third listen to it every day."
The words 'music' and 'industry' were never meant to go together. Music should come from the heart, not the wallet. This idea that you can become wealthy by being a musician is a new one and we've suffered for it.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Free music IS NOT the way to go. Warez IS NOT the way to go.
However, streaming music services certainly ARE. Spotify has been around for an year in europe now and its getting close to US launch soon. Everyone I know has stopped pirating music because of it, and personally me and my friends paste spotify links to listen to good new music. And same thing is with my gf, specially because she's been away at her home town this summer. But we like the same kind of music so we paste those link on facebook. Easy and convenient.
I'm actually happy record labels have started to support these things. Great respect for them for that, because thats exactly what we need and want in these days. And they still get the compensation in ad revenue or premium membership. We cant buy every album, because theres just certain amount every person can spend on music per month. But we can listen to them with flat rates or ads. And everyone benefits, including record labels.
Industry with a track record of charging insane prices for crappy products, ripping off artists who they claim to represent, and developing a business model of suing their own customers in gross abuse of the legal process is experiencing financial difficulties. We'll be providing blow-by-blow coverage.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
An article about an industry that is dying, published by an industry that is dying. Both are being killed by the same new technology.
The artist will win. No more signing away most your rights with shady contracts. No more skimming 99.9 cents on the dollar for CD sales. No more lock in for future albums. Artists are making their money by selling direct to consumers with online distribution channels because it gives the unknown artist a shot. It also promotes better music because when the consumer has better choice, they will choose better music.
The direct sales channels will continue to grow and standardize so I expect the traditional industry losses will accelerate.
Camping on quad since 1996.
The reason why streaming music is taking over is because radio is crap. Seriously, if you don't like hip hop, pop, country or classic rock, there are -no- stations other than that anymore. If you have musical tastes other than that, too bad. You won't find any terrestrial radio that plays that. So because of that people stream more, in general streaming music ends up being better and have a greater variety. If I can't find a terrestrial radio station that plays music I like, I'm going to then listen to streaming music. Because of that, why buy the music when you can with a bit of searching find the streaming music?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I don't have to manage my playlist or do anything extra to discover new music.
The variety of stations available online means that I never have to listen to music that's stale.
I can listen from any computer in the house.
It costs nothing.
The amount of commercials is tolerable.
The only downside is that I can't find any riaa-free stations. Does anyone know of any?
If by music industry you mean anything that is distributed in the form of iTunes or mp3's with a useful half life of a month or so, I'm all for its demise and good riddance.
The vast majority of that sort of stuff is dung. If we are talking about taxing cigarettes and sugary carbonated soda and fast food, no reason to not extend that to this sort of "music" as well.
Once this sort of stuff is gone maybe people will get a chance to listen to real music, in person or played back on high-fidelity equipment.
It might be an epiphany.
Duh, CDs are for old people. The RIAA should concentrate on expanding into the untapped market of North Korea.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
</pedantry>
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
There was once, music tapes cost SGD $8. When CDs hit the market, they cost SGD $30, but it was promised that they would go down to the same price as tapes one day. Isn't it time to sell full albums at SGD $5, considering the volume that the music industry is able to produce? Isn't that what industries do best - to give what the market wants at a cost leveraged by the economics of scale? Given that the packaging that comes with the CD does cost something to make, but essentially, isn't music, as a commodity, like software - make once, and sell it many times over? Given the international market exposed by the internet, is online music, too, overpriced? Or perhaps society needs to rethink the place of musicians - perhaps they could be like open source software authors, who have a day job?
The article says that digital purchases were down from 2007 to 2008, but the graphic shows that both download album and download single peaked in 2008, meaning they rose from 2007 to 2008. Did I mis-interpret or miss something?
There, fixed that for you. The record industry is the one that makes money on recordings. The music industry is the one that makes money on music in general including concerts. The music industry is fine and will be fine. The record industry is fucked.
These reports all say the same thing: concert ticket sales growth more than makes up for the decline in recorded music sales.
They speak of the 'Music Industry' as if it incorporates ALL musical acts out there.... A few questions for the 'Music Industry', and all you fans out there.
How many bands out there are unsigned? How many of those bands have their music available to listen to, or buy, on the web? How easy is it to trade those bands tracks, between friends?
The sad part of all this 'Music Industry' broo-haha, is that there is large market that the 'Music Industry' doesn't touch, monetarily. And guess what. They don't know how much it is, but they can speculate, and claim it directly effects their bottom line on reports like this one, and every other report we've heard about for the past several years.
Should I believe these reports that claim the 'Music Industry' is in dire straights? No. And neither should you. Between 'complex accounting' practices, and the complete monopoly of an Industry for almost the past 100 years, and the fact that a band can curtail the entire industry and make it on their own, shows you that, though they still are king of the hill in the industry, in their current form, their obsolescence is inevitable. And THAT is what scares them.
'Track record', eh? Tee hee. Very clever.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
They do things like put music onto myspace and into video games and kids hear the song there and then the execs wonder why the kids are not buying CDs, and it's like "for fuck sake, how many times do you want them to purchase the same song?"
When I was a teen, about 15 years ago, I was also listening to streams. But at the time, it was called ... FM radio!
Sheesh.
Hi. I'm the American actor, violinist, ballet dancer, and sculptor. We have little sympathy. Welcome back to having to make art because you love it, and not because you expect it to be a lottery ticket.
These "music industry" people want the equivalent of 250 thou for a 25 grand commuter car. nuts. They wonder why sales are off, whereas a billion music purchasers know exactly why sales are off, they just don't feel like getting price gouged anymore.
I suggest the "music industry" lay off all the coke and booze for a year or two then come back and rethink their stance on pricing, for digital bits down the tubes or the same digital bits on two cents worth of plastic. Their "per unit" pricing is from decades ago, it doesn't come close to anything rational anymore. When it was very expensive to make a copy for sale, sure, it was understandable, but now, today?? Who are they kidding besides themselves?
Tech advances and much cheaper bandwith should have allowed them to both drop prices dramatically, plus increase sales dramatically, instead, they have clung to those old price models like a wino to a jug of t-bird with ten drops left swirling around the bottom. It's pathetic really. I bought music pretty steady from the late 50s until the 90s, that's forty years of being a customer..then...just finally one day got annoyed with the price gouging, quit then, my one guy boycott. I don't pirate, but I won't pay those ludicrous prices either for some digital download copy (a buck for a few megs, who do they thing they are, telco ringtone sellers??), and certainly not a lot of folding dollars for a dime's worth of plastic with some cardboard "liner" nonsense.
OK, maybe the car analogy sucks, how about computers? A decade ago, what did a decent desktop system go for, and what were the specs? Now, today, you can get something much faster, with equivalent increases in installed RAM and larger HDD and better video card etc, and for much less cash. You gets lots more, for less money, because of tech advances. And that's tangible hardware, manufactured stuff.
A decade ago, an album cost how much? And what do they want for it today? Oh ya, the same. And to *download* it they want similar loot? HAHAHAHA
Like I said, "nuts", you lost a good customer for being price gougers. In fact, looks like you lost millions and millions of customers, and the younger folks are starting to not even *be* customers in the first place, because they know even better that those "copies" just aren't worth what you ask.
The way I see it, the recording/copying technology created the industry in the first place at the cost of local/family musicians. The next iteration of technology made them obsolete. Recording execs are like telephone switchboard operators - one wave of technology created the role, the next wave destroys it. They're just trying to manipulate the law to defy the reality of technology ... why should this be different than any other industry since the start of the industrial revolution? (oh right, nobody's "profiting" off this change - can't allow anything to happen that doesn't make the rich richer, can we?).
...at least be correct.
Warez refers to pirated goods. I'll grant you that it primarily connotes pirated software (with or without cracks applied or included) but the term is absolutely used to refer to pirated music. I can give you references if you like, but 5 minutes with Google should make it pretty apparent.
I would love to see this graphic superimposed on one for video games. I imagine kids today are spending far more for their media on their Wiis, Xboxes, PS3s, PCes, PSP, DSes, and other gaming systems than they did on Nintendo DS cartridges and Quake in 1999. They are probably also running up their cell phone bills. The dollars probably just migrated.
I'd like to know what titles people were buying as CDs in 1999. New stuff or old?
Could it be that people were replacing their vinyl in 1999 and before, and that the whole peak in 1999 was really an effect of replacing one version of something with another? I'm not saying that the decline isn't real, I'm suggesting that the curve is much less than it seems and the peak is artificially high.
A little bit of common sense is in order for this topic. A lot of people seem to be on the right track, though.
The main consumers of new music tend to be people younger than 30. The average person in that age range, for the most part, grew up with the internet in their home. Napster alone is 10 years old, and how many million people were using that? MP3's were around and traded long before that, too. I myself am a youngin' compared to a lot here on /. and I remember trading .wav files for music swapping before mp3's were the norm.
Let's face it. No one can reasonably believe that the record industry couldn't come up with something better for distribution in the 10 years since Napster. Consumers have become disillusioned and know they're being taken for a ride every time they buy a CD. I have a hard time justifying even walking into a record store, unless it's privately owned. If it's a chain, I laugh at the older people inside as I walk by.
The radio is being programmed by computers based on how much radio advertising dollars can be generated. There is NO variety in the music whatsoever on terrestrial radio, and you'd know it too if you could catch a few songs back to back. But... when's the last time that's happened?
I haven't been able to go 15 minutes on any given station without hearing 5 minutes of commercials. They even have commercials promoting the station you're already listening to. And, to top it off, some of those commercials advertise how few advertisements the station has as compared to the other station in your town that plays the same songs and to complete the cycle of absurdity, you can bet your ass both stations are owned by the same company... Clear Channel. The people who still listen to terrestrial radio do so only when there is no other option. It's the musical equivalent of public transportation.
It's their own fault no one wants to buy a CD to listen to the same garbage they hear every 30 minutes on the radio, too. Who the hell wants to hear the same garbage on CD's, that they're forced to listen to already on the radio. Nothx.
Americans lost the right to choose what they listen to years ago. The internet is giving it back to them. It seems only natural that this would happen to the recording industry. But hey... the recording industry made a SHITLOAD of money, right?
What I can't figure out is how can they still feel sorry for themselves, and how can they expect consumers to feel sorry for them?
If the so-called artist quit writing absolute sh*t, people might buy it. The industry was predicated on the fact that people were willing to pay a lot of money for 11 songs they didn't want to get the one song they did. Therefore there was little incentive for the industry and the artists to make higher quality product instead of quantity. The advent of the MP3 took control away from the executives and lawyers and put it back into the consumers hands. And IMHO far too many musicians started to think they were the cat's t*ts because they sold a ton of albums. Wrong. They really sold about one twelfth.
You think like a ReThuglican Jew
I bought the first Velvet Revolver CD, which installed a rootkit on the computer to prevent you from doing anything other than listening to some shitty WMA files. After that I swore I would never buy a CD again, and I haven't. You only screw me once. So until we have no DRM and a perpetual license (buy the music once, have the rights to any format) I'm done playing their game.
I think a lot of the discussion around this issue ignores the fundamental fact that most of the activity in the music industry for the past twenty years has been due to the need for the music-consuming public to 'catch up' on the music that has been produced in the last 500 years or so. The industry went out of its way to force us to re-acquire this back catalog first on tape (replacing vinyl) and then cd (replacing tape). The bottom line is that the actual amount of salable new music produced each year is tiny compared to the amount of new material being produced.
I view the late 90s as an enormous aberration in history. The back catalogs of western music were basically thrown open to the public and there was just this frenzy of buying as well as looting (piracy). Now the cat is largely out of the bag, and the industry (in whatever form it survives) will have to get back to reality and balance its expenditures with whatever it actually is producing. Unfortunately for them, without some massive disruption in continuity of digital information, they will never have an opportunity to re-sell that many hundred years of human labor again.
(The previous two paragraphs are based on conjecture, anecdotes, and my own reasoning. I think my conclusions are fairly pedestrian, but if anyone has any statistics or studies as to the revenue generated by back catalog, I'd be interested to see them.)
http://www.prorec.com/Articles/tabid/109/EntryId/247/Over-the-Limit.aspx
RTFA, its a long one but a good one. Why do you think that the music on radio fails to hold your attention, or fails to impress?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Wow, I can't believe the number of replies from people who either think that "music" is only a live band, or that everything that people listen to from the iTunes Store these days sucks in both quality and content. What a load of crap.
The "music industry" is whatever people currently feel inclined to listen to. If Hanna Montana is all the rage, then who the frak are you to argue? I don't like her stuff, but who cares?! I don't think I like a single currently "popular" band out there, and I'm not even that old.
It's always been about marketing. As a kid, I used to listen to the radio to find new artists. It was either that or word of mouth peer pressure. (If you want to be in our clique, then you must like band X.) But times have changed. I can sample stuff all over the place. I can pick up a card at Starbucks and download a free digital track, or listen to streamed Pandora "radio" on the internet. Sure, I could go pirate stuff, but people don't just pirate gigs and gigs or random musical shit (well, okay... some morons do), they pick the bands they have heard about or sampled.
The music "industry" isn't dying. It's DEAD... and buried. It's just that nobody who has any real push has figured this out yet, or what to do about it. Radio is a waste of time, and beyond sites like Spotify, it's all word of mouth now. Which, frankly, is too damn slow and tedious.
There is no shortage of "music" or musicians. And thanks to the ability for nearly anyone to create studio quality recordings, there's even no shortage of actual material. But people want to be told what's "hot". It's American Bandstand, only there's no one at the helm.
There hasn't been anything remotely original put out by the music "industry" since 1971.
Seastead this.
80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That's less than one percent of the songs.
So much for the internets "fat tail".
I am predicting that the book industry will soon find itself in the same boat as devices like the Kindle become more.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
"Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday.
[pedantic brat] Actually, if it were decimated, it would only be dropped by 10%. It's a special Roman punishment for one's own armies whereby the general killed one out of every ten men (or 10%). This can be highly motivating, and was a much feared punishment, generally reserved for Mutiny.
[/pedantic brat]
The ______ Agenda
My wife can bang out old Beatles classics on her guitar all day, and it cheers me up a thousand times more than any of the crap on the radio or the Internet.
Sometimes I suggest a song to her that she doesn't know. She takes this as a challenge, learns the song, and then serenades me with it.
Life is good.
I agree with "hyperproduced kiddie s--- artists" as an audience exploitation and fatigue factor.
I remember when my daughter was 7 or 8, D: "Brit-Neee!" (infatuation) A few years later I asked her what happened to her infatuation with BS. D: "britney" (flat, ugh).
True enough - creating a profit from recorded performances is mostly an artifact of the 20th century. In the early days of the recording industry the artists didn't even get royalties from sales - they were paid a performance fee for the recording session, and that was it. Millionaire actors and musicians are a recent peculiarity, it's not a divine right.
Here is my take on the music industry. In the middle of every decade there has been a "musical shift" (not always exactly in the middle, but there was a shift around this time). Mid 50s - Rock & Roll. Mid 60's - British invasion, Motown, Psychedelic. Mid 70's - Album Rock, Punk, Disco, Funk. Mid 80's - New Wave, Metal, Rap. Mid 90s - Alternative, Hip Hop. I'm sure I'm missing a few. Each of these brought excitement, brand new fans, new sounds, etc. Mid 2000s - NOTHING.
I listen to music the RIAA does not own, but they'll still shut them down because they think it's infringing on their bottom line.
*DrugCheese rants*
I made the last few records I wanted to on my home protools with a little bit of cash to do really loud stuff in a room. Payed some cash to mix with a friend in his true room with a couple of speaker sets. Made some money selling disks at gigs, kept all the money ... profit! This is a great time to be a 21 year old in a rock (are they still calling it that?) band. There's no money, but there's no money anywhere in 2009, and you can sit around, make music, play music and get paid.
20th century media belongs to the past. That mechanism had died artistically a while ago. Around the time of the Paris Hilton sex tape it was all over. So all you lawyers get different jobs, all you audio engineers buy your own gear and make art.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
. which is why the music industry still has its head high in its asses by cutting the stores & outlets from where they can peddle their wares, and owned by RIAA completely
EMI, Sony and others should sit down and asses how much of their income went to lawyers and the RoR on their investment in RIAA.
Once they learn the true picture, they will abandon RIAA and consider creating music rather than creating lawsuits...
But then EMI is a leader in restricting and refusing to serve customers...so its a matter of time..
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I read in a few of the comments posted here that many of the users here believe that this bodes ill for FM Radio. As someone that was just recently laid off from the interactive portion of a large radio broadcaster here in the states, I can tell you the only thing that will kill FM radio is FM radio.
What I mean by that is that the broadcasters themselves, like the rest of the music industry, have largely been highly resistant to change. Be it the embracing of interactive advertising, or even recognizing that they now have a lot more competitors than just the other radio stations across the street (Hi Internet Radio!!).
The way I see it, this is an amazing opportunity for music in-general to become much more highly diversified and with more emphasis on bands being local/regional sensations rather than the end-goal of national/international sensations (although that possibility will always be there). Anyway, local FM radio stations could very well be positioned to be the thought/taste leaders when it comes to which local/regional bands become "big." A hearkening back to the hay-day Program Directors and DJs had in the 80s where they pretty much ruled the roost in radio stations and had much more weight in determining which bands became popular. It would allow each radio station to become a sort of... mini-label in and of itself.
However, FM radio has been moving away from local largely due to Clear Channel and its crowd-sourcing, cost-cutting efforts of sharing content across stations/regions. But perhaps with how the economy has been kicking CC's butt, this trend could change. But it will take time, and it will take some of the larger broadcasters taking a risk. Will it happen, I don't know. But the opportunity I think definitely exists.
streaming music on the internet IS radio, in terms of beaming out channels with advertising support. the only difference between streaming music and radio is streaming music has a billion more channels. that's the only difference
you seem to be confused, that taste in music has absolutely anything to do with this. in fact, there seem to be a lot of people who seem confused here, that the death of the music industry will kill pop music and result in some sort of nirvana of quality. on the contrary: there are plenty of gems that never get pop air play, but there's also a much vaster sea of mediocrity out there that doesn't get airplay deservedly so: it sucks. you may say all pop music is crap. yes, there are pop music that derivative and empty, but also plenty that is quite good, according to any objective measure of originality, nevermind all the subjectiveness that obviously comes into play which ultimately renders all such comparisons pointless
which gets us to the larger point: there seems to be a lot of people who derive pride in being counter culture. that they don't listen to pop. this, 20 years after alternative music has become just another category the music industry markets and caters to. no, it is more the truth that anyone who needs to feel better than other people has a character weakness, and a truly well-balanced person likes what they like and doesn't really care or feel a need to feel better than anyone else simply because of that
a poser: i am better than you for arbitrary unsubstantial reasons and i feel a strong insecure need to feel better than other people... which, in a way, makes me even worse than the average secure pop listening person
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The graph is indeed pretty illustrative, but to suggest the CD is being killed off by streaming is misleading, because they don't graph the main competitor to the CD.
That's right, the minidisc.
Welcome to the information revolution, consumers found out about BETTER music which isn't on major labels and are LISTENING TO IT instead of your compressed pop garbage. Real music is not made loud so it can sound good on the shitty FM radio stations WHICH NO ONE LISTENS TO ANYMORE because FM PLAYS NOTHING BUT GARBAGE COMPRESSED CRAP!
MTV IS DEAD, they play reality tv shows now, FM has nothing but spanish latino tax dollar funded welfare dance radio AND MP3 IS CRAP TOO!
The supply/demand model of the capitalist market promotes a natural evolutionary path for all industries.
I imagine the horse and cart makers had similar comments about their industry in years gone by.
If people want commercial music, they'll eventually pay for it otherwise it will die out as being no longer of sufficient utility.
Put simply, if the music industry becomes unprofitable, then it is because it is supplying a service that consumers no longer desire at that price point, and we shouldn't be concerned by that!
The records labels screw EVERYONE over, including themselves. If this wasn't the case, why do SO many artists start their own labels or fight long legal battles to get out of the constricting contracts they signed when young?
Why has the music industry not leapt on digital distribution from the beginning? They could have totally controlled the market by just creating iTunes before iTunes.
But they don't because the music industry is NOT about promoting artists or giving customers the best value for their money. it is about making the maximum amount of money for the least amount of work. Now you might call that sensible business, but it isn't.
McD sells you mayo for your fries as an extra, that is sensible. Selling you the salt as extra isn't and would just turn customers away.
The music industry would wish that you had to buy a CD for your stereo, a seperate MP3 for your portable, another CD for your car, a ringtone for your phone and then also pay them a fee for any blank CD's, hard-disks and media players you buy. That has nothing to do with promiting music anymore, that is pure and simple greed and comes bloody close to strip-mining the industry. Getting the last money out before it all collapses.
Record labels support the artists. My god man, read a book, just once.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
LISTEN to a top 1000 and wonder about the many 1 time hits. Some of them were of course produced but a lot of them just happened by chance. Someone heard it, played it for some friends and it spread. Music promotion is overrated for a lot of artists, because either they never get it in the first place OR their big hit happens from word of mouth while they pay the record label for all the publicity that didn't work. Oh, you thought the record labels payed for promotion? How silly of you.
The record labels do a LOT less then a lot of people seem to think and still the best way to promote yourself is just to send your CD to every radio station and offer to perform live whenever you can to hope enough people hear your music to spread your music. And you do NOT need a billion dollar industry coming up with endless schemes to drive customers away to do that.
In fact, an old dutch project "One day fly" showed that you do not need the music industry at all to create a hit. A radio presenter and some friends made a crappy song, promoted it heavily on radio (themselves) and voila, instant hit. You need people who can play your music to others to get noticed. The record labels do precious little more then buy you some airtime and that only for the big sure fire hits.
Oh and for the small artists, all that promotion you end up paying yourself for, so that even when you score a big hit, most of the profits will be sucked up by the record label.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's like saying of the illuminated book 'industry' in 1499 that "the latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the reading business is free, legal printing presses".
The measure of an industry is not the size of its profits (except in the minds of those mythical entities called corporations). It is the extent to which it affects people's lives. I could argue that the recording industry actually diminished the social culture of music, because it meant people could listen to music without interacting with the performer. On the other hand, it did allow more people to enjoy music by the most gifted performers. As does radio. As does the internet.
Isn't Madonna already 60?
. . . No way. Wow. You're kidding, right?!?
Why the hell would I want to:
- use bandwidth every time I want to listen to something
- place my music 'collection' in the hands of a third party who can pull the plug whenever they see fit/go bust
- allow a third party to track what I listen to without my consent
- be depdendent on a functioning net connection for my music
I much prefer to have my music safely on my local computer in unencrypted, DRM-less form, thanks.
Read Pynchon.
All the stuff on Dischord (Fugazi et al) sounds F'in great, and their setup cost no where near that, unless you count their group home.
Besides, a good song is a goos song, even if it's a little scratchy, most people will listen to it.
..........FULL STOP.
Their fixation on only promoting the latest musucians and music. Found any older music in the stores lately? I doubt it. And I'm talking about CDs from an artist released perhaps a year or two ago. More and more one walks into a Borders or Best Buy (or whoever) -- both of which used to have good and sometimes great selections from most artists catalogs -- and find virtually nothing. Nowdays, it's only the latest CD or two from an artist. Anything older than that and you're lucky to find it at all. Some artists's older music can only be found on compilations, greatest hits CDs, or, lately, remastered versions of older CDs (at a higher price, or course). It's truly pathetic. Customers wanting to find anything from a band's back catalog are just out of luck. (Unless you're lucky enough to find a band that sells their older releases on the band's own web site.) Mom and Pop and Indie music stores that used to cater to the real music fans have all gone out of business. Folks that want to buy actual, physical CDs are just being ignored.
Call me old fashioned but I have no real desire to entrust my music collection to being a nothing but a bunch of bits on a hard disk. How many music customers out there already have lost their entire music collections to a failed hard drive or MP3 player or a decision by some company to cease authenticating DRM-encumbered songs. (Or someone who has a music collection they amassed while they were a Windows user but have switched to Linux?) I'm looking for honest-to-goodness CDs dammit and not a download that can be lost due to an freak power failure crashing a hard drive.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I have cash to burn, but I am definitively too old. The stuff which they put out for sale, DO NOT interest me. What I like is stuff like electrical music vangelis/Jean michel Jarre , classic from funeral march for a marionette to tocatta in c minor, and a few rock/hard rock group and strange stuff (queen, megadeth, smashing pumpkins, and a few other less known ; commercial stuff like e-nomine, and a few other like in-extremo). For the first group, there isn't much which was put to sale recently and has got the quality of an oxygen, or heaven and hell. For the second group you can own so many version of them until nothing new comes out, for the third group, i search and search but rarely find stuff of interrest.
So what bring us this long rambling on my taste ? I started buying a lot of CD end on 90. Then by 2002 it dwindled down. Because my classic collection was complete, and for electronic music I did not find anything new, except a few rare stuff coming from Japan (Idea/eufonius). Sure, I would wish to see much more new stuff, but my exposure (university) has dwindled only to friend and colleague. So now a day I try pirate stuff in hope of finding something to buy which please me , and I throw everything away after trying. The bottom line is that I buy no CD , not because of the crise, but because nothing cater to my taste.. Yeah my taste are eclectic.But hey nobody is perfect.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I've seen around 1000 bands or so play(punk, hardcore, deathmetal, noise), none came even close to the sonic bombardment of the MBV encore, except maybe Swans. Not Motorhead, not Godflesh, not Sunn O))) - I haven't seen KISS, so I can't compare.
And yes I concur - the F'ing drummer always sets the volume of the band. They just can't seem to play fast, without playing really loud (and vise-versa)
..........FULL STOP.
I do notice that some younger people actually prefer this "wall of sound"++ thing. they WANT their MUSIC TO BE IN ALL CAPS!
I prefer my own music with more melody, it don't matter much for me wether that is clasical, jazz or heavy metal but I DO prefer the few heavy metal songs that are "classical" in nature. Few of the young people get what I mean, how can I like One by metallica but not most of their other crap? Because One is not a constant barrage of sound. It has a "story", lows and highs, movement. It tells me something rather then just pound the same beat for an eternity.
So Louder is Better, for a certain audience.
the real tragedy here is that by trying to maximize market share, the record industry is instead driving customers away.
Both you, me and the writer of that article are old farts. This music has not been mastered for us.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hard to see TOTAL sales, across all mediums. I wonder how much is attributed to format change and if there is base volume of music sales that industry will settle at, now there isn't a new format for everyone to go buy (LP $ -> Cassette $ -> CD $ -> digital FREE).
If we assume average teenager has 100 Euros per month to spend ...
20 years ago, they mainly spend it on music, beer and cigarettes.
Today they spend it on mobile, internet, DVDs, computer games and some for music.
There are so many options beside CDs.
Music industry simply lost entertainment money share.
Few years ago a pool was made in London: kids prefer to stop going out for beer in order to spend last pounds on their mobile phone.
Admittedly, I arrived just at the dawn of the CD, but even I can very well imagine gladly paying $XX more for and LP than for a CD, especially since I know and feel that the contents of the CD are the same as of the free digital copy, and that all CD's are exact copies of each other. Their is no added value of the carrier, and I think the music industry decided to forget this. Not only does the LP allow you to literally feel the music in the grooves, but since the carrier is analogue it will be perceived as unique and personal, even though the difference may not be noticeable at first. It's same sort of difference between a book and a pdf file. Same contents, VERY different feel. We still gladly pay quite a lot for a book, but would we pay even a fraction of that for a pdf file of said book? And after time, would you gladly exchange your book for a fresh copy, or keep 'your' copy, even though some pages may be smudged, corners folded? Also, the possibility to ship beautiful and detailed large print artwork with LP's is something that can easily add a couple of bucks to the product's perceived value. Regarding quality of playback, I think DJ turntables show that is not an issue, really.
(continuing) Also, the music industry can then simply give out digital copies for free listening online from their website, but they will be perceived as the poor man's music source, like reading books in the library.
Getting the last money out before it all collapses.
Exactly like the Nazis before the end of WWII.. *Exactly* like them.
Buy,Buy,Buy My new record Buy,Buy,Buy Send more money Fuck you Buddy Fuck you Buddy
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If the new york times thinks that an infographic they need to hire some new design people; take a look at wired mag; or just browse the interwebs.
teque5.com
(The previous two paragraphs are based on conjecture, anecdotes, and my own reasoning. I think my conclusions are fairly pedestrian, but if anyone has any statistics or studies as to the revenue generated by back catalog, I'd be interested to see them.)
Likewise.
When the CD was introduced, everyone who wanted the new format ended up having to upgrade their collections or continue to use their current LPs and casettes until they wore out. The CD was not recordable (and would not become recordable for another 8 years), so dubbing one's existing collection to CD was out of the question. Still, the promise of the new format was enough to finally kill off vinyl, as no doubt customers were sick of worn out records and eaten cassettes, and loved the idea of a format whose marketing promised a century of readability without analog degrading. The CD gobbles up vinyl's market first, then the cassette's after the introduction of anti-skip buffers. Eventually people's old collections are either worn out or become difficult to play due to inconvenience, and people start re-buying their old music on CD. Sales skyrocket, because the labels are not just selling their discs to new customers, but also to old customers who bought the same lineup of recordings years ago, and were replacing their recordings at a rate faster than the usual re-purchase due to destruction of the old medium.
But the CD, being a digital format, had an advantage over the previous formats of vinyl and cassette. Because the tracks are digital, they can be extracted and easily transferred to another medium. The labels knew about the transfer of recordings from a CD to another medium, but anticipated the process would be in the form of a conventional dub using analog means, much like what the casette tape allowed. Hence, the CD did not have DRM, and no attempt was made during the specification process to prevent digital extraction. Once digital music started becoming the norm, the prediction was that customers would dub their tracks using S/PDIF to MD or DAT, or to the new CD recorders. So the labels lobbied for the AHRA and SCMS.
Of course, what happened instead was that these new digital formats failed to gain traction, and a new more efficient method of digital transfer arose: the digital extraction of tracks to a hard drive using a computer. Unlike a dub, ripping did not require playback of the source medium. Despite the original rips of CDs taking a long time due to encoding and slow processors, the difficult task of ripping only had to be done once. Once done, the tracks can be copied to any writable medium with ease. If one wanted to copy a CD to another CD, a computer allowed for a verbatim copy from source to destination without the need for any dubbing. Suddenly, any future form of music storage, which would inevitably be some sort of digital file, could not be as successful as the CD. Even tape, which also had the ability to record from another source, would inevitably have made more money from back catalog updating due to the tediousness of dubbing, as opposed to the straightforward process of ripping.
Phillips and Sony outdid themselves with the CD, making it almost impossible to create a successor. Attempts to try (DVD-Audio and SACD) failed because their features catered only to a select few and due to low player and disc support. Digital distribution is successful because of the a la carte model of allowing the selection of individual tracks, and the convenience of having songs beamed directly to your hard drive, since a new CD would just end up there anyway. But it would be absurd to re-buy all of your music online if you already have a CD, as you can just get the track from your existing collection, leaving back catalog purchases to those who do not know about ripping.
So to compare the revenues of labels from their peak in 1999 is absurd, as much of that revenue no doubt came from back catalog purchases. Instead it would make far more sense to compare it to revenues from before 1981, before the CD came out (adjusted for inflation of course).
This bullshit about the music coming from the heart is nonsense.
Some music may come from the heart, but most of it is just like anything else: a way to get the bills paid, a job that is undertaken for utilitarian purposes, and this includes most musicians you care to name.
It is also perfectly legitimate to want to become rich by playing music, but is also legitimate to want to become rich making computer programs, websites or tinkering with hardware.
What is not legitimate is to expect to become rich by doing nothing, which is what many people in the music industry (a perfectly adequate sentence, please drop the sentimental dross) come to believe was their birthright.
Many people are decrying that they can now make a living only by performing! When people utter such musing you know how dettached from reality they have been, all courtesy of artificial and abusive copyright terms and restrictions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The music industry is so discredited that they are compared unfavorably with other cartels (the Colombian drug ones for example) or other fine organizations like the Chicago mafia.
Musicians had come forward to tell how they risk everything while music labels risk precious little, the onerous terms of their contracts have become the stuff of legend.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The question is ... do those "starting bands" have more money after the RIAA has finished with them? The answer is usually no - look how many number one bands have declared bankruptcy or just plain given up after a while once they figure out how screwed they are.
No sig today...
Because people that do not learn from history, frankly deserve to be derided in any way possible.
You said "he big label records AREN'T there to fuck everyone over."
The reality:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2289224.stm
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html
So they screw both artists and consumers.
And that is only for starters...
Please, get real.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Please, lets not go down there.
Advertisement is expensive because the people working on that industry believe they are second tier artists, and actually aspire to live the same lifestyles of the rich and famous that they promote with their "services".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Um, most big labels will insist on turning the compressor to the max so if anything they're the ones who'll make it sound horrible.
No sig today...
There's a general misunderstanding I see here anytime record companies are discussed. Time after time, people say that the label pays for all sorts of things to help artists. The truth is that all of that stuff isn't given to the artists, it's an advance on future royalties.
The artist has to repay the label for the cost of recording an album. The labels charge artists for promotion, too. It's a universal practice to include a "breakage" fee, which means the artist only receives royalties on 90% of sales. Concert touring expenses are also recoupable, paid for by the artist. Royalties are calculated on wholesale prices, not retail prices, so deals with record clubs can be based on deeply discounted wholesale prices and lower royalties
The industry is geared to produce a few smash hit artists. Those who aren't given preferential treatment are generally stuck with big debt to the label. If the label decides not to release an artist's music, the artist can't release it on his own - and this happens quite a lot. The label can insist that the artist remain under contract for 7 years or more, while never releasing any recordings, so the artist is essentially silenced
There is no hope of getting a song on a commercial radio station without the influence of "independent promoters," who have a lock on what stations will play and only promote songs after receiving huge payments. Radio airtime has nothing to do with the merits of the music. No song gets played on commercial radio without a payment to an independent promoter
Most people who have very strong opinions against the music industry have little idea of exactly how bad the industry is. It's a rotten and corrupt industry.
Read what Janis Ian has to say. Read The Truth about the Music Industry."
A proper percussionist can play drums loud or soft, as required.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
William Shakespeare made between 6 and 10 pounds for each of his screenplays.
Not just answers, the correct questions.
The newish generation of music consumers doesn't give a rats ass about "owning" music at all, either physically or digitally. The advantage that net streaming is bringing over radio streaming is that the consumer can pick the playlist rather than have a payola funded DJ pick it for them - the similarity is that they're funded by ad interruptions. And when its free and you get to listen to whatever you want whenever you like what is the point of handing over cash so that you can have copies in your house so you can listen to whatever you want whenever you like?
The days of turning off the lights for an uninterupted hour or three of a great intertwined albumn aren't over, as it was always the hardcore music lovers who would do that anyway (Orb Live '93 is my favourite....) but since the late 90s the casual music consumer really hasn't been that bothered about owning a music library and if us geeky folk at slashdot dont understand that then the RIAA execs have no chance of keeping up.
Oh and In Utero is far superior to the overproduced shiney shiney radio friendly unit shifting Nevermind
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
That's 100% right - I only occasionally buy a CD but there's so much less that's interesting. The other factor is that on the movie side they actively go out of their way to STOP me buying movies.
When I'm travelling for work, I sometimes get bored. So I'd go and buy something. What can I not buy? Movies! They won't work when I'm home other than by using a player that bypasses the region limiting - in other words, I should stay home, or buy pirated stuff (which I don't do out of principle). Well, fine. So I can't buy exactly at the very time I would still have an incentive to get a DVD - at home it's all electronic.
I can't quite work out if they're deliberately running their own industry down or that they are just plain dumb. Given the sheer dedication to doing absolutely stupid things I can only conclude it must be deliberate.
Nobody is THAT stupid, no?
Insert
>with whatever it actually is producing
And as soon you realize what that is, you'll know they won't be changing.
oh right, nobody's "profiting" off this change - can't allow anything to happen that doesn't make the rich richer, can we?
Not when decades of their propaganda have turned the public so effectively in favor of bits-as-commodity that Kim Jong Il even began taking notes.
"You wouldn't steal a car.. would you?" Never in all my years have I heard such a good promotion for auto theft. ;P
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
People are buying less music because the industry offers very little worth listening to. Seriously, have you heard any tunes recently you will find yourself humming along with ten or even two years from now?
There are reasons why there are so many "golden oldie" stations. Songs used to have melodies and hooks and sometimes even virtuosity by the players. No more, or at least no more for the pablum that is played on the radio or shows up on MTV/VHS.
Inefficient Industries need to Die.
Whether it is GM or the music propaganda industry. They need to make more of what we want and are willing to pay for, and less of what we don't want.
If you can't make a profit, then those industries aren't doing anyone a favor.
Seeing rap stars driving around in $500,000 cars wearing $150,000 chains makes me sick. I'd really like to see all that go towards helping others (or even something less flashy) and see those people become even more famous for helping less advantaged families.
"And now besides the point, record labels aren't there just to rip people off. Artists actually need them. They actually find the artists that could be something, provide them studio time and sponsor them so they can get their job done, help making the music videos, doing promotion, making sure the actual product is somewhat quality (yeah, quality can be argued!) to actually delivering the products to retailers, tv and radio stations and whatever other places. Lots of times people forget that record labels do lots of other work too and sponsor the bands, and they're not there just to collect money forgefully."
Man, what rock have you crawled out from under?
The artists provide their own studio time, much to their dismay when the find that their 'advance' on record sales paid for all of the bills for the studio, the pressing/production, the promotion, the tour, the hiring of strangers, the transportation of said strangers and equipment, the catering to feed everybody.
The artist have paid for all of that and suddenly find out that the labels do a lousy job when they are handed a bill instead of a check at the end of it.
The music industry is a shameful sham. A&R is a just hunt for the next suckers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I say good riddance. The music industry hasn't turned out good music in decades. I have bought two CD's for myself in the last 20 years. There is enough music already composed and performed to keep all of us listening to new songs every day for the rest of our lives! I say we pirate what is out there now, and let musicians be forced into finding truly productive work.
The real problem is that we use too much of our copious spare time merely entertaining ourselves, and enriching the elitist, arrogant musicians who think they deserve all that $ for producing such garbage. Why don't we use more of our spare time to solve some of humanities real problems, instead of just distracting ourselves? We could have cleaned up every innner city slum, and cured cancer by now. (And while we're at it, keep the stupid TV off, too.)
since the ban of all digital music online this new infographic show a stead drop in CD sales due to people getting off their computers and turning on the Radio. In this forgotten medium people can tune to an FM or AM frequency and find streaming music in a genre they find appealing.
When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.
They would 1. Stop targeting 13-18 year olds. 2. Produce more album oriented music 3. targeted at 30 year olds 4. who regard their time as more important than money.
The graphs in TFA cite RIAA figures, with CD (full) sales peaking in 1999. Let us throw in a couple other dates, not mentioned in the article.
Napster's peak was 2000-2001. Very small drop in sales there. Certainly nothing anywhere close to the cries heard from the RIAA before Napster was shut down.
Compare to 2003 to present when iTunes has been around... big drop.
TFA summary: (legal) downloadable singles is killing the music industry and the funeral will be sooner than you think.
says it all.
If 77% of products on the shelf at Wal-Mart never got any sales, those stores would be filled to the rafters with the other 23% that do generate the sales, with a heavy emphasis on that 1% that generates the bulk of sales, in no time flat.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let it die, its inefficient
The product sucks, but we steal it anyway
Data wants to be free
These are the amazing in depth and complex arguments as to why this decline is necessary to the Slashtardian idiot. It sees no problem in obtaining the product of someone else's labor for free, then complain it sucks or they had problems "downloading" the shitty lossy compressed downloadable version and actually had to get up off their fat smelly pimply ass to go and get it.
Lastly is the Utopian Delusion of Free, everything to all and may it be free.
I agree, I'll be over to pick up your car, your house, your hardware software, all of it and even your wife given shes not as homily as you.
So technically your Free argument not only applies to the validity of property ownership at the time of its creation but also post acquisition meaning, YOU DONT OWN A FUCKING THING.
Knowning most of you tools voted for Obama and that was aided by the NYT, you should listen the fuck up because your industry of creating code is next and if you think Open Source is gonna save you, you are a fucking retard.
The reason why music sales went down lately is due to the fact that listeners have gotten better taste and will no longer want to hand their hard earn money over for shit that make their ears bleed.
wasn't there just a story I read recently that the head of the UK's music indutry trade group reported profits for 2008?
http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/7th-january-2009-bpi-press-release-7c-uk-reports-resilient-music-sales-in-2008.aspx
as far as I can see, someone here is lying. The music industry may be hurting for profit, but it's due to their own management's inability to shift their business model to a more profitable one to align with the changing market.
They're using their grammar skills there.
how do you find people to distribute it to? Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
do you recognize the irony in your nay-saying word-of-mouth, bottom-up, crowdsourced content evaluation on one of the most prominent collaborative blogs on the internet, and one of the most successful examples of the very model you are dismissing?
Marketing my friend... you still need them for marketing. Just like how you can make your own chili, but try packaging it, and getting them into grocery stores and people buying. Not easy. It's one thing to run a lemonade stand, and another thing entirely to sell your lemonade in every store across an entire country or planet.
requiring registration at the New York Times.
Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I view the late 90s as an enormous aberration in history. The back catalogs of western music were basically thrown open to the public and there was just this frenzy of buying...
You've got it right. 1999 marks the peak of CD sales, and "big label" profit, and the "labels" have been trying to sell politicians and the public on the notion that this peak (which as you note is largely a back-catalog based windfall) is the "normal" financial state of the industry which must be restored (largely by legislation, certainly not innovation).
This is not unusual behavior for an industry - did you know that the U.S. farm industry (nearly all agribusiness mega-corps now) considers the unusually favorable prices of 1910-1914 to represent "normal" pricing (it is termed "parity") and regularly seeks price supports to drive prices up to that level?
An interesting side-note to the rapid adoption of CDs that I rarely see mentioned is that during the 1970s and 1980s the quality of manufactured LPs fell of a cliff. It became normal to buy a disk with gross defects.But with CDs, either the pressing was perfect or it didn't play at all. So the take over by CDs was partly due to the terrible quality of the LP product. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the "labels" found a way to ruin the quality of CDs - by volume compression. Was this also a factor in the decline of CD sales?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
lol it has nothing to do with free legal or any of that shit
its all about there dont make shit worth downloading buying stealing or p2p what ever you want to call it any more
why should we run to buy there junk if its not worth it
most of the shit just like movies is recyled shit from years ago with a small twist
Ok, most of what they produce is crap. It has always been thus, Sturgeon's Law and all that. That isn't the problem.
No, my problem is more basic. Assuming I found some new music I liked, how am I supposed to buy it? Buying a CD is a crap shoot. Since the CD format didn't include DRM they just hose the quality to try and stop you from extracting a digital copy. Bleh! Or you can buy a digital copy..... good luck finding FLAC or any other uncompressed format. Apparently the unadulterated CD of the 1980's and 1990's were the pinnacle of audio quality and it is all down hill from here?
Offer me FLAC (or another uncompressed format that I can find a converter for) with at least 44.1kHz, 2 channels and I'll consider buying. If you really want my money how about an improvement over twenty year old tech, perhaps 48Khz, 20 or 24 bit samples and multi channel. Uncompressed is important because I stuff compressed music into things, recompression is bad. As tech improves the compressed versions will change in codec and quality. Rebuying every few years is not something I plan to start.
Democrat delenda est
All the good music has already been bought. The music industry is just recycling onto new media over and over. This leaves the Indie players producing new stuff. The big players alienated their buyer base to boot.
You want to know why I haven't bought music since 1989? It's simple - I'm tired of buying 'compilations' of the same songs that I already have, for insane prices. I've got a CD burner, I'll make my own mixes thanx... And I can get more than 15 songs on a CD (where there's 1 or 2 good ones, and 14 shit). Once MP3's hit the scene, who needed CD's? I have a hard drive and the ability to stream my own music to wherever I happen to be, when I want to listen to it...
I haven't listened to ANY FM radio since about 1990... I hate commercials. Plain and simple. I refuse to listen to that never-ending stream of shit. So I'd program 3 or 4 decent stations into the radio. Commercial comes on - hit the button, back to music... Until CLEAR CHANNEL... then it was all commercials at the same time. That was when I turned off the radio. The only thing I listen to is the traffic reports on AM...
My wife has XM - but I'm not paying for that shit in my car. I have all the music I want or need, so I shoved an ipod with a transmitter in my car... I listen to what I want, when I want to listen to it and there's absolutely, positively NO FUCKING COMMERCIALS...
Fuck the RIAA and their price gouging for recycled music. Fuck the RIAA's teen artists with the fake voices... They should rot in hell. Fuck a bunch of assholes who can't update their business plan to give people what they want at a fair price and who cry like babies and sue, sue, sue... Go see a real act at a bar or other venue - pay the artists if you like the tunes...
I can't wait for the RIAA to die so I can piss on their grave....
New music sucks. Boring, formulaic crap by forgettable artists. That is the problem.
When I started PCDJ in 1999, we couldn't get agreement from anyone to allow us to digitize music for use with the player, so in essence, a DJ would have to rip his whole collection rather than just purchase in MP3 format. MP3 format was evil as it promoted "stealing" in the eyes of these guys.
The thing that isn't looked at is the stats of the music business were going up until the RIAA shut down Napster. People were previewing music and then going out and buying it. Some guys didn't, but they would have never purchased the music anyway.
Then the industry stopped taking chances and developing new acts. (That started somewhat before 1999, but continued.) Do you realize the amazing artists that would have been dropped after one album under current standards? Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zepplin, Nirvana, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, etc.
So, these guys and the way they operate are dead, they just haven't realized it yet.
I suspect that the artist of now and the future is going to make a living with touring and mechandizing and much less from album sales.
Also, one other thing to note with iTunes, etc. A singles market is what is now viable and in truth the cost of delivery for digital downloads is practically nothing, so although the dollar amount for sales is down, the profit should theoretically be up because of no cost of delivery, no traditional retail middleman.
Anyway, that's my .02
Laura Betterly Yada Yada Marketing Firm
You can always rely on /tard moderation to tag some fucking worthless logic to posts that are simply contain dime store logic and let me just say you fucknuts, I dont work for the record industry, am just a musician who gave up on the "business" so long ago. I have a real life now, one not dependent on others honesty, especially you tards.
I have read posts here from dickwads who think "musicians make too much money" and "that its time for that to end". Hey communist fuck you and your mother, I think you fuckhead coder geeks are way overpaid especially since its all bug laden shit for the most part and then you blame microsoft, haaaa.
But lets get to the real issue, stealing aka downloading and calling it anything else is lieing.
You fucking tools actually believe that free downloads actually encourage, stimulate sales.
Wow now thats fucking genius in some fucking alternative shithole universe or worse the Communist Hell of the Soviet Union. I have news for you, all that free and unfettered downloading does is encourage one to find even more free content of the saame with a small percentage of honest and caring fans who actually seek to purchase the offspring of your labor. Janis Ian said it herself, a whopping what $2300 in sales estimated.
If thats stimulation, then you are fucking doomed to be a loser for eternity
Now how bad has it gotten, well you wonder why music sucks and why in my day, the 60's, 70's and 80's, everywhere you turned your head you heard good music across a wide spectrum of genre and the artists, who started humbly enough could evolvle or die, that was made possible by the ability for them to make a living. Now they need fucking merchandising and forays into more visual media where they become whores of the bigger machine and the last thing they can concentrate on doing and doing well, is making music. The reasons that has all has changed are 2 fold, that renaissance is over thanks to the inability for musicians to make a living playing music, typically not get rich, just make a living. As the biz collapses from the top to the bottom where the vast majority of musicians reside, you'll be left with Guitar Hero or Rock Band or worse Spears, Back Orifice Boys etc etc.
You made the choice and now you will live with the consequences of those choices as Ayn Rand kicks your tiny little testicles until they rattle your molars.
Once again your "Free" model means the end of all things, especially creativity.
The downslide is just getting started you idiots, your next and wait until I unveil my Autocoding AI, will render useful code without your fucking sloppy and shoddy workmanship, dickwads.
The music industry should blame Steve Jobs. Regardless of what folks think of the ethics or lack thereof of the music industry and the avid listeners they call pirates, the decline of the CD is due directly to on-line streaming pioneered by Apple. And while there appears to be less music being sold by volume, I suspect that is an artifact of how sales are counted. Usually half the cuts on a CD are not worth listening to so if I have perfect choice of songs instead of 15-song albums, the loss of music sales ought to 50% instead of 15%. They are selling a lot more _music_, probably from a lot more different artists, but aren't able to sell packaged CDs so much because you're probably still wasting half your money.
The music industry has two problems of their own making. The first is the overpricing of music, even while they rip off the artists who create their product. The second is most music of today sucks. Back before music/record companies began to be run by MBA's and accountants, the people who ran them cared about music. They would take time to develop an artist. Even releasing several albums that didn't sell well and keeping the artist because they believed in them and thought the public would eventually catch on. A lot of good music in the sixties and seventies happened like this. Would Frank Zappa ever get signed today? Of course not, so we're left with companies that want blockbuster hits right away which means thee is no time for artists to develop. Also, different branches of the same company don't put in the same amounts of time and money to promote artists. I have a friend who was in a band from New York who were signed in the 90's by Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, it was Warner Brothers New York who didn't really put much into promoting artists. He found out that if the had been signed by Warner Brothers L.A., they would probably have put a lot of time and $$ into promoting his groups' album. They got their advance, recorded the album, found out what was really happening from other groups on the label, and used the remainder of their advance to go to L.A. and play clubs, hoping someone would help them, and broke up when the money ran out. The music industry is changing and the dinosaurs who run it can't see what's going on so they blame it on downloading and free streaming. If they would put out better product, maybe more people would pay for it. Who wants to spend $18 on a CD which has only one or two songs worth listening to. Change is coming.
See above.
And reduce your costs. Pretty simple, eh?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Could it be that the music sucks?